Clutter Craft: Upcycling Vintage Drawers into New Dressers

By Loef

A drawer without its slot sounds about as useless as a light without a bulb (or a lamp without a plug). At the same time, vintage drawers tell fascinating stories of styles gone by, from their outdated color schemes to handles and pulls no longer in production.

SchubLaden takes these half-functional elements and gives them a brand-new home inside painted and stained composite-wood frames constructed around the size of the existing objects that must now fit within them.

The results are (naturally) a mixed bag when it comes to look and feel – some are easy to spot as worn or old, while others blend rather readily in a modernist black-and/or-white setting.

Scuff marks, paint chips, exposed wood and even hand-marked numerals are left intact – all remain pieces of personal history carried forward in a new form. Some are custom made-to-order uniques while others can be partially replicated (at least in terms of shape and size), depending on available drawers.

In some pieces, the old components dominate the scene. In other works, such as the wheeled side table in the image above, they act more like accents within a mostly-modern composition. In this case, the vintage element is not even apparent from behind.